<html lang="en"> <head> <title>Introduction - Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html"> <meta name="description" content="Untitled"> <meta name="generator" content="makeinfo 4.13"> <link title="Top" rel="start" href="index.html#Top"> <link rel="prev" href="Preface.html#Preface" title="Preface"> <link rel="next" href="Getting-Started.html#Getting-Started" title="Getting Started"> <link href="http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/" rel="generator-home" title="Texinfo Homepage"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"> <style type="text/css"><!-- pre.display { font-family:inherit } pre.format { font-family:inherit } pre.smalldisplay { font-family:inherit; font-size:smaller } pre.smallformat { font-family:inherit; font-size:smaller } pre.smallexample { font-size:smaller } pre.smalllisp { font-size:smaller } span.sc { font-variant:small-caps } span.roman { font-family:serif; font-weight:normal; } span.sansserif { font-family:sans-serif; font-weight:normal; } --></style> </head> <body> <div class="node"> <a name="Introduction"></a> <p> Next: <a rel="next" accesskey="n" href="Getting-Started.html#Getting-Started">Getting Started</a>, Previous: <a rel="previous" accesskey="p" href="Preface.html#Preface">Preface</a>, Up: <a rel="up" accesskey="u" href="index.html#Top">Top</a> <hr> </div> <h2 class="chapter">1 A Brief Introduction to Octave</h2> <p><a name="index-introduction-7"></a> GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient interactive command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language for data processing. <p>GNU Octave is freely redistributable software. You may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. The GPL is included in this manual in <a href="Copying.html#Copying">Copying</a>. <p>This manual provides comprehensive documentation on how to install, run, use, and extend GNU Octave. Additional chapters describe how to report bugs and help contribute code. <p>This document corresponds to Octave version 3.2.4. <ul class="menu"> <li><a accesskey="1" href="Running-Octave.html#Running-Octave">Running Octave</a> <li><a accesskey="2" href="Simple-Examples.html#Simple-Examples">Simple Examples</a> <li><a accesskey="3" href="Conventions.html#Conventions">Conventions</a> </ul> </body></html>